ANXIETY AND TEACHING
There is probably not a teacher anywhere in the world who in his professional carrier, has not experienced a wide range of pupil-behaviors varying from perspiring, trembling, rapid breathing; slip of the tongue, wrong spelling, inaccurate calculation, and meticulous caution, etc., to shyness, worrying, impulsive disorganization, avoidance of tasks, and so on. Such behaviors are nothing but a manifestation of an unpleasant emotion commonly known as anxiety. Anxiety is pervasive in the lives of human beings, that it has its effect on cognition, performance and personality. It is imperative that, the classroom teacher should make use of curative and preventive measures to reduce the intensity of anxiety in those pupils who are a victim to it, and to maintain others to continue to be normal, by avoiding anxiety charged situations in the classroom.
Psychological point of view
Freud(The Problem of Anxiety, Psycho-analytic Quarterly Press & Norton, New York, 1936) holds that anxiety is a phenomenon springing from the suppression of instinctual drive and innate desires, and also from some kind of imminent threat or danger. Thus, he states two categories of anxiety, objective (realistic) anxiety, and neurotic anxiety.
Objective anxiety – It refers to a real (eg. To be afraid of a poisonous snake), or anticipated danger whose source lies in the external world. It incorporates a sense of helplessness and general malaise.
Neurotic anxiety – It has no source in the external world, and it refers to perceived (for apprehended) danger. According to Freud, the danger is an institutional one. That is, the person is afraid of being over-powered by some impulse or thought; but the reaction to it is excessive, thus, revealing the neurotic element in anxiety.
In addition to objective and neurotic anxiety, Hilgard and Bower(Theories of Learning. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: 1975, P.351) state another kind of anxiety that they call as moral anxiety.
Moral anxiety- It is aroused by a perception of danger from the conscience (super ego). The fear is that of being punished, belittled, or degraded, for doing or thinking something that is contrary to the age ideal. Moral anxiety is experienced as feelings of guilt or abuse.
American schools of psychoanalysis hold that inter-personal relationships is the “source par excellence of incipient anxiety, the hostility-alleged or real- of the outside world to which the individual stands in a complex and multifarious relationships”.(Social Foundations of Education, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1969, p.97)
Behaviorists do not subscribe to the existence of emotions as inner states because it is difficult to verify their emergence as measurable phenomena under experimental conditions. However, they identify anxiety as an “innate drive” which motivate an animal to perform acts such as running, jumping, ringing of a bell and so on, which accompany the primary ones. This interpretation of anxiety may not have much relevance to educational practice. Further, human behavior unlike that of animals, is often rational and goal oriented. Obviously, “man does not, merely like animals and machines act in accordance with rules; he acts because of his knowledge of them. He forms intentions. We cannot bring out what we mean by human action without reference to the ends which men seek and the plans and rules which they impose upon their seeking. Indeed most human ends are impossible even to describe without reference to social standards”. (Cf. Cole S. Brembeck and Martin Grandstaff, Social Foundations of Education, op.cit. p.99).
Spielberge conceives two kinds of anxieties- State anxiety and trait anxiety. A state anxiety is evoked when the person perceives a stimulus as potentially harmful to him; otherwise, the level of state anxiety is low. Thus, it is transitory in nature. Trait anxiety refers to anxiety as a stable personality trait. A person who is high in trait anxiety is disposed to perceive a wide range of stimulus situation as dangerous or threatening, and respond to such threats with high state anxiety. Spielberger expatiates trait anxiety stating that (a) anxiety states are evoked when the person perceive that he is in a threatening situation; (b) the intensity of the anxiety state is proportional to the severity of the threat, the person perceives; (c) the anxiety state will persist as long as the individual perceives that the threat is continuing; (d) high trait anxious individuals perceive threats of failure, or threats to self esteem, as more severe than do person having low trait anxiety; and (e) high trait anxious individuals perceive more situations as threatening than do low trait anxiety person.
Sarason, Mandler and Craighill(The effect of Differential Instruction on Anxiety and Learning, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1970 pp.159-168) distinguish between facilitating anxiety, and debilitating anxiety. They propose that anxiety, per se, need not necessarily lead to poor performance. Any challenging situation like a testing situation is likely to evoke a state of arousal or enthusiasm rather than a dread, worry or other unpleasant feelings that normally accompany the stimulus; and this effective feeling is the facilitating anxiety.
The forgoing section explained a variety of views on anxiety; and they are of divergent nature. Despite this, certain assumptions are universally accepted:
(a) The emotional state of anxiety is a real phenomenon; and every individual clearly
experience it.
(b) Anxiety affects the life of the young and the old
(c) Psychoanalytic thought on anxiety has great relevance to educational practice.
EXPERIMENTAL RATIONAL
A number of studies show the relationship that exists between anxiety in testing situations, and cognitive variables such as memory, attention, and problem solving. They also show the effect of instructional strategies such as objective based instruction, programmed instruction, pupil-centered teaching, classroom interaction, pupil feedback, task definition, classroom, climate, and so on. A brief review of the findings would be profitable to understand certain pertinent teaching models.
Anxiety and Cognitive variables
Memory is one of the important cognitive areas that is influenced by anxiety. For instance, highly test anxious pupils tend to do relatively less well on problems requiring say recalling the outcome of the previous trails, the set of facts to be used in a subsequent aspect of the problem, and so on. Such pupils performed as least as well as low anxious pupils when memory support was given. A few varieties of external memory support, such as diagrams, notational system, methods of outlining general ideas prior to the development of details, use of symbolic logic to provide a way of sorting and organizing complex information, and so on as well as internal memory supports like mnemonic devices are helpful for the pupils who are influenced by anxiety.
Generally, anxious pupil are more selective attenders than nonanxious ones, and in this testing situation they tend to focus their attention more on the person administering the test, on their own concerns about failure, and on the task they are supported to be doing. Easterbrook(The Effect of Emotion on Cue utilization and the orgaization of Behaviour, Psychological Review, 1959, 66,pp.183-201) found that the attention of anxious pupils was limited to certain classes of cues only, and thus, their incidental learning was relatively less.
Anxious pupils are emotionally responsive; and hence, if one is anxious, he is most likely to make well-learned response provided he is given the appropriate stimulus conditions. However, they contend that complex and subtle learning tasks which demand one to make difficult discriminations in order to select a correct response from a response hierarchy, the high anxiety pupils would only add to the confusion and difficulty of such tasks. The relationship of anxiety and task difficulty was studied by Spence and Spence(The Motivational Components of Manifest anxiety Drive and Drive Stimulus, in C.D. Spielberger (Ed.), Anxiety and Behaviour. New York: Academic Press, 1966) in 1966, and Goulet (Anxiety (Drive) and Verbal Learning: Implications for Research and Some Methodological Consideration, Psychological Bulletin, 1968, 69, pp. 235-247) in 1968. These studies indicate that anxiety facilitates learning, and performances of simple responses, and hinders that of complex responses. In 1970, in a complex experiment in which Hall(Anxiety, Stress, Task difficulty and Achievement via Programmed Instruction, Paper presented at a meeting of the American Educational Research Association: Minneapolise, March, 1970) studied that interactive effects of stress, level of test anxiety (low, medium, and high), and task difficulty, he found that difficult material produced higher levels of state anxiety than the easy; and stress did not yield significant increases in state anxiety as compared to nonstress.
Anxiety and Instructional Strategies
As stated earlier, a number of studies show the positive effect of instructional strategies on the reduction of anxiety, and bettering of performance.
The experimental evidences regarding state anxiety and effects of behavioral objectives on learning demonstrate that the relation between the degree of state anxiety reduction and the use of behavioral objectives is quite complex. However, the results for cognitive measures show that objectives sometimes assist pupils and rarely detract them from learning situations. Similarly, objectives sometimes reduce state anxiety and rarely increase it(Anxiety, Learning and Instruction: Hillsdale, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum associates,1977,p.153); and perhaps, it is because of the fact that objectives provide direction for learning, facilitate subject matter organization and integration, stimulate increased self-management towards achievement of specific learning goals, and introduce a mechanism for non-threatening self-evaluation. (Principles of Instructional Design. New York: Holt, Rinehart,& Winston,1974).
Individualized instruction is the strategy recommended to meet the needs of individual differences in the class. Compared to traditional class teaching, this strategy is free from the potentially confounding effects of classroom, climate, teacher behavior (particularly oral questioning), negative self-evaluation, and the like. In individualized instruction, pupils are provided with a highly specific objective, expressed in behavior terms, as well as carefully sequenced tasks to achieve the objective. Programmed instruction is one such strategy used frequently in instruction. Kight and Sassenrath,( Relation of Achievement Motivation and Test Anxiety to Performance in Programmed Instruction , Journal of Educational Psychology, 1966, pp. 14-17) administered a programme dealing with test construction to a population of college students. They found that anxious students work faster and made fewer programme errors than less anxious students. There were however no differences in the achievement of the two anxiety groups.
The teacher-centered and student centered instruction are the two predominant practices in every school. In the former, the subject is taught in the lecture format and in the latter, in the discussion format. Dowaliby and Schumer(Teacher-centered versus Student-centered mode of college classroom instructions related to manifest anxiety, Journal of Educational Psychology, 1973, pp. 125-132) studied the interaction between anxiety and teacher-centered as opposed to student-centered instruction. They found that the student-centered mode resulted in higher achievement than the teacher-centered mode for students who were low in manifest anxiety, and the opposite occurred for those high in manifest anxiety.
In order to tap intrinsic motivation, teachers profusely use the technique of competition in classroom instruction. But, a study made by Deutch(A Theory of Cooperation and Competition. Human Relations, 1949, pp.129-152) showed that when groups of pupils were competitive rather than cooperative, a stress situation seemed to occur. The communication of ideas, cooperation of efforts friendliness and pride appeared to be disrupted in competitive groups; and there was less group harmony and effectiveness. There was some indication that competitive situations produced greater personal security through expectation of hostility from others than did cooperative situations. Dunn and Goldmann(Competition and Non-Competition in Relationship to Satisfaction and Feelings Toward Own group and Non-group members, Journal of Social Psychology, 1968, pp. 299-311) made a study on groups working on competitive and non-competitive situations in on order to observe the effects of these conditions on the satisfaction of the group members and their feelings towards own and group members. They found that if the group had approval, and if group members together undertook and successfully complete tasks of significance to the group, then the members feeling of personal worth and importance were affected positively.
In an ordinary classroom, interaction between the teacher and the taught is a common phenomenon. In this teacher makes use of a variety of positive oral reinforcement such as ‘good’, ‘try harder’, ‘right’ etc. as well as negative reinforcement in the form of punishment such as verbal and in extreme cases corporal punishment. Generally, positive reinforcement such as ‘good’ produces higher performance in anxious students rather than the word ‘try harder’. Regarding the punishment for undesirable performance, it was ineffective with anxious children. However, giving token reinforcement for desired behavior and ignoring undesired behavior were generally highly effective. The highly anxious pupils tend to be considerably more responsive to positive verbal reinforcement than were low anxious persons. A study was conducted by Campeau(Test-anxiety and Feedback in Programmed Instruction, Journal of Educational Psychology, 1968, 59, pp. 159-163) . He used a constructed response programme, with a sample of fifth grade children. Half the children were given the feedback concerning the accuracy of their responses and the other half did not receive it. Campeau found that there was significant interaction between anxiety and feedback for girls, and not for boys. High anxiety girls achieved more than the low anxiety girls in the standard constructed responses with feedback condition. When feedback was removed, the achievement of the low anxiety children exceeded that of the high anxiety children.
SUGGESTIONS
A person who has confidence in himself to face any situation in his personal life as well as in others who are concerned with his affairs at home, school and the community, is little prone to any kind of anxiety. It signifies a major task on the part of teacher educators and educationists. It may be explained.
Human life is a vast arena of noxious stimuli that generate anxiety; and in this respect, life in educational institutions is also not an exception. Thus, anxiety is inevitable; and it is a concurrent variable in life. Therefore, teachers should train pupils to face anxiety provoking situations of school life and similar situations of the society of today and of tomorrow. He should provide experiences symbolic of normal life along with the allied problems and uncertain situations, and enable pupils, through practice and precepts, to realize that such events are not only unavoidable but also to be faced squarely with confidence. Education should foster courage in the child, to face difficulties and overcome them boldly, and not to evade them. This in turn augments self-confidence and eliminates anxiety.
Many a time the pupil develops anxiety in situations that demand his confidence to establish social relationships with others in the school and society. It is possible for the teacher to develop in the pupil this kind of confidence by providing activities in which the pupil would come into close contact with his own peers and members of the local community. In such activities that involve inter-personal relationship, the teacher should be vigilant to prevent the behaviors that are likely to make disruptive effect on anxious pupil. Further, he should adopt a gentle attitude with pupils, and at all costs avoid aversive punishments, both verbal and corporal. In fact, punishments like ignoring the pupil, shaming, sarcasm and ridicule have painful effects more on an anxious pupil than on an ordinary one. A few teaching models a teacher may adopt in the class in general and with anxious pupils in particular are given below.
- In order to supplant cognitive process, that are impaired by anxiety, as well as to facilitate recall of facts, the teacher provide step-by-step plan of instruction, and also profusely use external memory supports and devices. If necessary, through realistic plan of instruction and organization of work, he should provide opportunity for the anxious pupil to over-learn both cognitive and psychomotor skills which they have failed to accomplish.
- Anxious students waste a lot of time in worrying for themselves, and making relevant, apologetic, and self-deprecating remarks about themselves; and this kind of distraction results in poor performance. Therefore, the teacher should train them to focus their full attention on the task at hand, and to perform every task in a business like and effective manner.
- The rapid development of knowledge in general, and that of science and technology in particular has made two kinds of impact on the curriculum at all levels of education- expansion of areas of learning, and intensification of content in each area. In each curriculum revision, the trend has been to introduce a wide spectrum of newer subjects and topics, as well as to put more details into, or to restructure and reorganize, the areas that already exist in curriculum. There is no denying the fact that this trend has every justification from the broader point of view of education. But it is also a fact that, this is against the interests of anxious pupil who by and large constitute the majority of student population; and probably, against the interest of normal students also, because such curricular changes constrain them to struggle hard so as to cope up with new demands, and such experiences make the prone to anxiety. Two major instructional approaches that serve both education and pupils are as follows.
- Allowing such curricular changes, the teacher should adopt strategies of instruction that would enable anxiety prone students to profit by education, and others not to become anxious about the heavy demands of the curriculum on their capacities and cognitive abilities, which at times are likely to immobilize or disorganize their psychic energies. To illustrate,
- The teacher should define the objectives of instruction on behavioral terms
- Organize the lesson properly and integrate it with the objectives
- On the basis of individual capacities, define the specific task that each pupil should do
- Make use of adequate evaluation techniques and use the result for feedback
- Provide adequate classroom interaction and employ the necessary reinforcements
- Maintain good classroom climate, and if necessary provide humor too.
In order to individualize instruction, teachers are required to make a wide use of techniques such as programmed instruction, computer assisted instruction, and audio visual instruction. The major aspect of the teaching-learning process is the interaction as well as the inter-personal relationship between the teacher and the taught; teaching machines and language library also form a major part in teaching-learning process. The teacher should be careful in choosing the techniques that contribute to lessen the anxiety of anxiety prone students, or create an anxiety-free climate in the classroom.
The teacher should identify pupils at all levels of ability who experience a high degree of anxiety, encourage them to express any uncertainty or difficulty they experience in mastering school works, motivate them to express their dependency on the teacher for additional interaction, and enable them to understand that the teacher’s esteem for them or their self-esteem does not depend only on their learning or performance in a test. Further, while dealing with such pupils, the teacher should deliberately reduce the stress of school situations. At all costs, the teacher should avoid making unpleasant emotional expressions such as “good for nothing”,”useless”etc. Such expressions of disapproval, although well meant, lower the morale of the class, produce an atmosphere not conducive for work, and prevent anxiety prone pupils from perceiving clearly and correctly, and make their perceptions rigid and flexible.
Secondly, the subject matter of the existing curriculum should be modified in the form of cognitive modules, making provisions for shaping, reinforcing, and supplementing cognitive skills that are needed for successful learning. As it is known, the term “module” refers to a complete package of self-instructional material in the written form including the following,
- The specific behavioral objectives to be attained through the module
- The material including the text, tape, slide, film, video tape
- Criterion measures to assess whether or not the student has mastered the specific objectives for the module
- The instructions for the use of the module when these are not self-evident.
In a developing country, illiteracy exists in a large measure, and it reigns supreme the social behavior of individuals so much so that a pupil from an ordinary home is not only denied the privilege of getting parental cooperation in his education but also suffers from cultural deprivation. Therefore, the teacher is constrained to shoulder the entire responsibility of the education of such pupils as well to compensate their cultural impoverishment. Again, in educated families, for economic reasons, both the parents go for work, and they have little time to attend the education of their children. Therefore, in such cases also the teacher has to shoulder the entire responsibility to teach from the correct methods of reading, writing and ‘arithmeticking’ to the development of right skills and attitudes. All these become impossible unless the teacher gives individual attention to every pupil in the class. It is one side of the picture. On the other side, in a developing country, there is a great upsurge for mass education; and it is rightly so because equality in educational opportunities is guaranteed by democratic institutions; and denial of education to any child in the name of class, creed and race contravenes constitution. In order to translate this into practice, as well as to reduce the cost of education which is now largely financed out from public funds without direct charge on pupils, the government has accepted the policy of admitting every child who desires to have education. As a result, an ordinary classroom has become not only multidimensional but also ‘populous’. Barring a few exceptions, a teacher is constrained to handle a class of not less than forty pupils located in the continuum of low anxiety to chronic anxiety. This defies all his attempts to pay individual attention. In this context, it may be stated that, equality in education also implies equality of rights to secure right education. Therefore, if there is any matter in education that warrants urgent attention, it is nothing other than teacher-pupil ratio that should never be an obstacle for anxious pupils to secure right education.